The Unlearned Lessons of the Iraq War, 20 Years Later: A Democracy in Exile Roundtable

 

 

"The fiction of weapons of mass destruction and "shock and awe." The facts of American occupation—of looting and lawlessness and Abu Ghraib.

It all started 20 years ago, when the war in Iraq began with massive U.S. airstrikes over Baghdad—what George W. Bush infamously called, in his televised address from the Oval Office, "the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." It sounded like a neoconservative fantasy, and it was.

Twenty years later, after the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of Iraqis—perhaps more than a million according to some credible estimates—and nearly 5,000 American soldiers, the war's legacy is a seemingly never-ending debate about the folly of American power and the failures of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Much has been written and said about lessons supposedly learned from the war, although the war's very architects and cheerleaders have studiously avoided any reckoning and accountability—and gotten away with it.

To understand and spotlight perspectives from the Middle East, rather than the usual suspects in Washington, Democracy in Exile reached out to Iraqis and additional voices in the region, along with other regional experts and observers, with a question on this anniversary. What is one lesson that still has not been learned from the war in Iraq, 20 years after the invasion?"

The Unlearned Lessons of the Iraq War, 20 Years Later: A Democracy in Exile Roundtable - DAWN

PAULO CARUSO

CARLOS RUAS

 

Como aconteceu a guerra no IraQue

 

 

"O Iraque é dono da 5ª maior reserva de petróleo do mundo, estimada em 143 bilhões de barris, bem como da 12ª maior reserva de gás natural, superior a 3.800 quilômetros cúbicos. Essas ricas reservas energéticas motivaram diversas disputas políticas ao longo do século XX."

leia aqui> 

Thread by @historia_pensar on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

Suzanne Vega - Gypsy

Oh, hold me like a baby
That will not fall asleep
Curl me up inside you
And let me hear you through the heat

The Iraq war didn't start 20 years ago

 

  JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

One of the problems with commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War is that the Iraq War didn’t start 20 years ago. It had been going on for more than a decade before Shock and Awe. First there was Pappy’s Bush’s invasion, followed by Bill Clinton bombing Iraq once every three days of his 8-year term and ratcheting down a sanctions regime that squeezed the life out of more than one million Iraqis, nearly all civilians. Clinton found that there more efficient and secret ways to kill. Pretending that the Iraq War started with Bush and Cheney is politically convenient for liberals and Democrats, even though many of them voted for the Bush’s regime change war (before they voted against it, in Kerry’s words). Even Bernie Sanders supported the Iraq War when Clinton was doing the bombing and imposing starvation on children, voting three times for the overthrow of Saddam as the “independent socialist member of Congress from Vermont.

So when did the Iraq war start? When Pappy Bush assembled an invasion force in Kuwait? Or was it when new US ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie met with Saddam on July 25, 1990 and laid a trap by contending: “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 1960s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.”

One can go back to 1983 when Donald Rumsfeld, acting as Reagan’s special envoy in the Middle East, promised Saddam support during the internecine Iran-Iraq war, which left more than 1.3 million dead. Or did it begin 20 years earlier with the CIA’s involvement in the Ramadan Coup of 1963, which led to the overthrow and execution of General Qasim and facilitated the rise of Saddam and the Baathist regime.

Of course, after World War II the Americans inherited Britain’s role as imperial master of the Middle East. As such one might credit the RAF’s Arthur “Bomber” Harris for establishing the precedent for Shock-and-Awe 70 years earlier with his prescription in 1936 for enforcing peace in the Middle East: “Drop one 250 pound or 500 pound bomb in each village that speaks out of turn. The only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand  and sooner or later it will have to be used.”

COUNTERPUNCH

Levantamento de cartas confiscadas de navios por britânicos entre os séculos XVII e XIX traz rico retrato da vida privada

"Em uma carta de amor de 1745 decorada com um rabisco de um coração atravessado por flechas, María Clara de Aialde escreveu a seu marido, Sebastian, um marinheiro espanhol que trabalhava no comércio colonial com a Venezuela, que ela “não podia mais esperar” para ser com ele.

Mais tarde naquele mesmo ano, um amoroso marinheiro francês que assinava seu nome M. Lefevre escreveu de um navio de guerra francês para uma certa Marie-Anne Hoteé em Brest: “Como um artilheiro incendeia seu canhão, eu quero incendiar sua pólvora. .”

Cinquenta anos depois, uma missionária no Suriname chamada Lene Wied, em uma carta solitária de volta à Alemanha, reclamou que a guerra em alto mar havia sufocado qualquer notícia de casa: “Dois navios que foram levados pelos franceses provavelmente carregavam cartas endereçadas a meu.”

Nenhuma dessas linhas chegou aos destinatários pretendidos. Em vez disso, navios de guerra britânicos roubaram essas cartas, e dezenas de outras, de navios mercantes durante as guerras da década de 1650 até o início do século XIX."

leia reportagem de Bryn Stole 

https://asultimasnoticias.com.br/entretenimento/arte/cartas-ha-muito-perdidas-trazem-noticias-finalmente/9448/